Reflexivity: Licensing or enforcing

Abstract

During my research I looked at 117 languages and their anaphoric systems. The main goal of this study was to analyse reflexivization, its reasons and effects, by covering cross-linguistic data and by taking into account the variation we find on a macro- and micro-level. To be more precise, throughout this dissertation I investigated: whether we find indeed some special marking for reflexivity, i.e. licensing of reflexivity, across languages. whether there are complex reflexives that do not have to be locally bound. whether locally bound pronouns provide indeed an argument against a requirement of universal reflexive-marking. The languages discussed in this thesis show that licensing of reflexivity is universally required, but also that a complex anaphor doesn’t necessarily enforce reflexivity, as for instance Indonesian dirinya. Hence, licensing and enforcing can be seen as two separate mechanisms. Looking at the different non-enforcing anaphors showed that one always has to take into account language specific characteristics when analyzing the anaphoric system of one language. Also, of relevance for the binding behaviour of anaphors is on the one hand the internal structure of the noun phrase and on the other hand the feature composition of the elements involved. Locally bound pronouns in Fijian and Mashan Zhuang have been shown to be able to license reflexivity and to make use of reflexive strategies. Consequently, we can conclude that the cross-linguistic analysis of the phenomena of reflexivization serves as evidence that universals do exist contrary to what has been recently claimed in the literature.